Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: A

CMOS stands for complementary metal oxide semiconductor.

It pairs n-type and p-type transistors so that almost no current flows except while switching, which is why it draws so little power and has become the technology of nearly all integrated circuits.

Answer: D

Paseo is not a computer - it was a Toyota car.

Aptiva was IBM's home PC line, Macintosh is Apple's, and Acorn was the British maker of the BBC Micro and the Archimedes, whose processor design became ARM.

Answer: B

Internet Explorer is a web browser.

Microsoft released it in 1995 and bundled it with Windows, which won it about 95 per cent of the market by 2003 and led to the antitrust case. It was replaced by Edge in 2015.

Answer: C

The signal an antenna or cable feeds to a television is RF - radio frequency.

The tuner converts it to a lower intermediate frequency (IF) for amplification, and the picture and sound are then recovered as video and audio frequency signals.

Answer: A

ENIAC was an early mainframe computer.

Built at the University of Pennsylvania and unveiled in 1946, it had 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 30 tonnes and was programmed by rewiring. It was the first general-purpose electronic computer.

Answer: B

Ctrl+M inserts a new slide in PowerPoint.

Ctrl+N opens a new presentation, Ctrl+V pastes, and Ctrl+L left-aligns text.

Answer: B

A .MOV file is a movie file.

It is Apple's QuickTime container format, introduced in 1991, holding video, audio and text tracks together. Much of the MOV specification became the basis of the MPEG-4 file format.

Answer: A

The keyboard is the most commonly used input device.

Its QWERTY layout dates from the 1870s typewriter, arranged to keep frequently paired letters apart so the typebars would not jam - a constraint that vanished long ago but whose layout survives.

Answer: A

It is not true that data stays permanently written in RAM.

RAM is volatile: its contents vanish the moment power is removed. The other statements hold - it can be read and written, accessed randomly, and retains data while the computer is on.

Answer: C

One megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes.

The steps go bit, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, each 1,024 times the last, because \( 2^{10} = 1024 \). Disk makers use powers of ten instead, which is why a '1 TB' drive shows as about 931 GB.